A serious curiosity derived from something I’ve noticed more and more often lately:
What the hell has happened to nuanced thought? It seems every day- more and more, it’s either this or that, with us or against us, black or white. What happened to the complexity of thought? Why have we come to be so polarized about every single thing that exists? And it seems it doesn’t matter the subject! The moment a topic is brought up. Sides are immediately taken in the War of Being Right.
It used to be that we considered things. We were rational. Logical. Contemplative.
Now? Everyone seems so quick to arrive at hastily constructed arguments that have to be either for or against- where no argument was necessary or even called for to being with!
It seems to me, that we need to relearn what was once so easily understood, and it’s that life exists between the boundaries of one and the other.
Online discourse stopped being about changing minds and started being about farming clout.
Most replies aren’t written to the person they’re replying to; they’re written to the invisible crowd that hands out upvotes. The goal isn’t persuasion, it’s applause. That’s why nuance is dead: nuance doesn’t get you 500 upvotes and a gold award. A savage one-liner that owns the libs / the chuds / the tankies does.
If you actually believe your view is correct, the morally consistent move when you meet disagreement is to engage and try to convince the other person (ideally while staying open to being convinced yourself). That requires listening, steelmanning, and sometimes admitting “yeah, you’ve got a point there.” None of that is rewarded here. What is rewarded is the quick, brutal dunk that signals “I am safely on the correct side” to the rest of the hive.
So people don’t debate in good faith anymore; they perform righteousness. It’s easier, it feels better, and the points roll in. We went from trying to do good to trying to feel good, and the karma counter is the drug that keeps the whole circus running.
There was also a flood of bad faith discussions with every fallacy in the book from belligerent actors. Like Cambridge Analytica and similar scandals including Xitter’s most recent offshore Maga influencer revelation, any significant media audience is ripe for astroturfing.
Edit: at the slightest hint of a disingenuous discussion, the cutting barbs come out.
Yeah. I’m inclined to see it this way as well. I’m sure there’s a lot of reasons, but this one resonates.
A lot of people just don’t understand nuance or anything else beyond black and white thinking because that is how they were raised. They don’t understand that other people have different experiences, especially if they don’t interact with people who have different experiences.
Our increasingly disconnected society means fewer in person interactions to reduce the chances of finding out something new when they actively avoid it.
All of that is lurking in the background when they hop on the internet and interact with others by not reading and understanding what is being said and instead just digging in.
In my experience when I try to have a nuanced take, people (intentionally?) misinterpret my nuance and use it to put words in my mouth and build a straw man.
Also hot takes are just way more entertaining, and what is social media if not a new form of entertainment?
That’s exactly what happens to me! It’s as if people have no point to make until they rewrite yours.
If it’s purposeful. It’s a brilliant strategy. Keep people defending against shit they never said and not pressing them to back up their points? There’s no way to lose. And in their minds, that’s what conversation is- something to “win.”
a lot of things are black and white though. the world is becoming more and more fascist, so a ton of people are done being polite and entertaining the spectrum of ideas. it’s easy to lose sight of it all and become frustrated and forget nuance.
I think people spend less time have long conversations with people that they trust, which are best space for nuance and exploring ideas honestly. If you’re messaging on social media, or even writing articles for blogs or publications, there’s a whole bunch of incentives and barriers that push people away from nuance.
That’s fair point. I hadn’t considered that.
It used to be that we considered things. We were rational. Logical. Contemplative.
Almost forty years on Earth, and I’ve never once experienced that. Humans have always been irrational, judgmental creatures, given to tribalism and social pressure. Maybe we’ve gotten more vocal about it as a result of the Western world being mostly peaceful for four generations, or maybe social media has made us more likely to interact with more people than we used to. But when were we rational? When our ancestors hanged or shot people over horses? Were they being contemplative while they burned people (or otherwise killed them) at the stake because they didn’t conform to the tenets of a book?
Was it rational and logical to force whole societies to perform certain tasks, and then deride them and try to harm them for performing those tasks?
It’s always been a crab bucket. It’ll always be a crab bucket. All you can hope is that you’re high enough up to keep your shell intact but low enough down that you don’t get grabbed for the stewpot.
Yeah, for me some of it is that I got more nuanced and forgot the places I used to be black and white / aim for a harsh burn. Not that I’m not still ignorant with plenty of black and what thinking.
And I think that besides people chasing upvotes, there is also more organising of movements online and by pushing issues into ethical framings that demonise the other side you create anger that keeps a movement going and can be directed but then large groups lose the ability to talk with nuance about that topic
The Hivemind Complexity.
I say that because it is a collective process that exist in a large amount of online communities, Lemmy and the Fediverse being no different. People online are way too used to having thoughts of theirs being parroted. Then comes the constructs of all of these karma systems for people to vote said thoughts of and that creates a level of its own discourse that, people will say or do things for some validity based on that.
And anyone else who comes along that thinks or says different than the seeming majority, are scrutinized, bullied and branded to be moderated.
Everyone is just too used to being around others who agree with them.
That’s a fantastic theory. I’d imagine there’s definitely some truth to that.
Is it less common than it used to be or are you just becoming more aware of it?
I feel it’s less common. I could be mistaken, but I don’t recall seeing it nearly as much as I have more recently.
Some amount of that is literal psyops. Every major country is intentionally trying to cause at least some division in their geopolitical rivals. There’s also internal psyops where governments will try to fracture any movements that might cause political change. At a smaller level, there’s echo chambers built by people that are already sucked into an ideology, hoping to propagate that ideology. This recent thread that had simple biological truth downvoted to hell is an example:
https://sh.itjust.works/post/50387688/22307005
All in all it’s not new though, it’s just gotten more efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism is one example of how it’s always been this way. Isaac Asimov also had a pithy quote:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
When you have your basic needs met and aren’t starving to death, you can afford to be irrational and embrace comforting lies. It’s just the human condition.
In the context of politics, billionaires have radicalized half the world into thinking that talking about ending certain livelihoods is just as valuable as talking about ways to improve life for your neighbors. It is black and white, there is no middle ground discussion on whether or not vulnerable populations deserve the right to exist
It was always like that, it is just that the intermet make it clearer
I don’t think that’s the case. Before the karma system there wasn’t really an incentive to dunk on someone. Maybe for someone who just wants to be a jerk, but they didn’t really get any applause for it. Nowadays every piece of content put online is put through the filter of “How will this be received?” It’s performative from the very beginning.
You’re probably right. I just don’t remember people being so combative all the time.
I’m actually going to say: stress. In economics as well as education, we’ve gone from a bell curve to a U curve. But regardless of which side of the curve we’re on, we’re almost all of us struggling in some way: rent, food prices, job security, worry about our kids, the environment, politics, end stage capitalism, whatever. And over the past decade, those stressors have built up.
People who are worried about how they’re going to pay rent/mortgage, what they’re going to eat, whether their car will last till next pay period, don’t have the luxury to spend time thinking about nuanced positions. I mean, they will if you push them, but it takes time and energy away from more immediate concerns, and there’ll be an undercurrent of resentment for you taking them away from important things.
People who are on the bottom or much of the right of the curve have niggling insecurities (is my job going to have layoffs, where I can get decent affordable childcare, why are electricity prices rising so much). They may be struggling, but they’re not constantly struggling like much of the lower classes. The hollowing out of the middle class isn’t truly visible to them yet. They hear complaints from the lower classes, but they seem very similar to what those complaints have always been. They know that those complaints have grown louder and more disruptive, but they assume it’s because it’s the same people it’s always been, just being louder and more disruptive. They haven’t realized it’s louder because there’s more people on the other side. And they haven’t realized that they’re at risk of moving to the bottom of the U curve - or even ending up on the other side.
Because of their assumption that it’s the same old group of people being more disruptive, they’re more dismissive of those complaints. And they have enough of their own stressors to deal with - food banks always say they need more (and more nutritious) food, but their primary concern are choosing a healthcare plan or childcare place that covers their needs without bankrupting them. It’s extremely stressful for them and they don’t have the time to spare to consider matters in depth either.
[I have another thought on the matter, but I’ll put it in a follow-up comment.]
This actually feeds into another thought I’ve had, which is covid. We manage our lives, and have time to spare for ourselves and others, because others have had time to spare for us. My job kept me late but my neighbor who works at the grocery store can grab me some baby formula since the sale ends today; her kid is sick but I have a WFH day so I can keep an eye on him while she goes to work. I have an endoscopy but my retired aunt can drive me to and from the medical plaza; she needs someone to check out her roof so I make time on a Saturday afternoon. We all have these little pieces of (what I’ll call) “grace” in our lives, things that make people’s lives easier. But the grace comes from pieces of other people’s lives.
Then covid hits. Something like 1,300,000 Americans die from covid. Yes, a number of them were elderly, but way more were still productive in small ways, providing bits of their time to make other people’s lives easier - the neighbor who picked your kid and hers from the same school, the guy down the block who shoveled your walkway when it snowed, your mom who came and took care of the house when you broke your leg, all helping each other.
Another 13,000,000 Americans, many of them in their very productive years, have long covid. Their focus is now just in getting through their daily lives. Not only do they no longer have bits and pieces of time they can spare to help other people, they require more bits and pieces of time from the people around them.
In my original scenario, if I have long covid, my elderly aunt still drives me to my appointment, but she has to either find a willing helper from a much smaller pool, or pay for repairs herself on a increasingly small fixed income. I don’t have the energy to watch my neighbor’s sick child (or risk getting sick again myself); she needs to work overtime to make up the pay and can’t get to my baby formula. My neighbor with long covid no longer clears my walkway, my mom died so getting help when I break my leg is harder and more personal.
Mr. Rogers said, “Look for the helpers,” but most of us were helpers in our own way, at different times of our lives. But so many people lost those bits of time we could spare other people, lost people who could spare time for us, and it all happened at the same time. [Well, over a couple years, but still … ]
Normally, if you lose a helper, you can find someone else to help; it may be a struggle, but you adjust. But everyone lost their helpers at the same time, any at that exact same time, everyone also ended up needing additional help.
It feels like a less kind world because it is less kind. We’ve all lost bits and pieces of our social support network, and we can’t afford to give away as much time or effort as we used to, and we have yet to acknowledge how much this loss of spare time, of grace given and received from others, has cost us on both an individual and a societal level.
And this loss of grace, especially unacknowledged as it is, has increased the amount of stress that everyone in our society is under. And where there’s increased stress, there’s less opportunity for nuance.
Twitter and its 160 character limit.
Fair point, if we were only to consider twitter. But there’s far more platforms than just that. And I never really specified it being an online only thing.
It seems discussion in all forms across all media lacks the nuance we once possessed.
I completely agree.
You could almost say that my reply… lacked nuance 😉
Part of it is microblogging. Part is the ubiquity of internet access and lack of general education in critical thinking. Part of it is a concerted effort by hostile actors (whether corporations, nations or other groups, such as oligarchs) to discourage long form media because it’s easier to push out Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that way than it is to be positive.
I think a lot of people have always wanted easy answers to complicated problems. Now they’re getting messages saying that they exist, and the people saying “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that” are the ones trying to twist them to an agenda.
Easy solutions are comforting. Why think hard if you can just blame someone else and not have to do anything?
Great point! I’m sure this among others is more than likely part of the reason.
Mass media runs on the idea of selling an idea in as few words as possible. It capitalizes on the fact that we are busy people and will only devote an infinitesimal amount of thought and energy into the idea being sold. So make it short, pithy, and at least on the surface, immune to critical analysis.
I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve composed a multi-faceted point or counterpoint to an opinion, only to be countered with, “I ain’t reading all that.” In that way, people who want to delve into nuance end up getting shut out of the discussion.
It’s out there, but you’re not going to find it on your average social media discussion forum.
youre arguing on the internet. there is no “nuanced” discussion
My every comment comes from a nuanced take. And I don’t argue on the internet which is the point.
Why does everything have to be an argument?
It doesnt. Dont have an argument? Learn to debate and listen instead
So… that you think that I am speaking only from the example of just my own conversions kinda’ illustrates my point.
A nuanced take would see a point from its many sides and consider the possibility of a conclusion. Not assume a point from one perspective and then jump to a conclusion.
My point is that PEOPLE argue without considering anything other than what they choose to see before them. Arguments that I have no part in aren’t for me to control.
